Virtually everyone, especially in first world countries, is on Facebook. Friends, events, pictures, and plenty more are all commonly found on Facebook unlike any other location. However, an ultimate geek may not want to use Facebook like everyone else — namely via their website.

Instead, the most geeky way to access the social network is to use the command line. This sounds like an impossible feat, but a PHP script is making it all possible.

About fbcmd

fbcmd is a simple PHP script (well, simple when compared to the actual Facebook website) which allows you to perform actions on Facebook via the script, as if the script were a natively installed application. You can then pass commands to the program, as well as any other flags or optional information as you’re used to from most other command-line programs.

Prerequisites

To use the script, you’ll need to make sure that you have some PHP modules installed. Under Ubuntu, you can install them by issuing the command sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-curl. Other Linux distributions should have similar commands with similar package names. Once those modules are installed, you can download fbcmd from this link here (right click it and choose Save As) or by issuing the command wget https://raw.github.com/dtompkins/fbcmd/master/fbcmd_update.php. Once that file is downloaded, go ahead and run sudo php fbcmd_update.php install.

Setting Up

Using fbcmd requires that you’re authenticated with Facebook, but fbcmd doesn’t use traditional login credentials. Instead, you’ll need to go through a setup process to get going. First, run fbcmd and you’ll see some instructions printed into the terminal on getting started. First type fbcmd go access to open up a connection to Facebook, then fbcmd go auth to launch a browser with an authentication code based on your Facebook account.

Then type fbcmd auth [code], replacing [code] with the actual generated code. You can then add permissions for fbcmd using fbcmd addperm, and check permissions using fbcmd showperm.

Usage

Now that you're finally set up, it's time to do some things with fbcmd. To post a new status, use fbcmd status [message]. If you'd like to see the posts others have made on your wall, use fbcmd mywall. fbcmd friends returns a list of all your friends, but you can also search for specific friends by using fbcmd friends "[string]" (remove the square brackets but include the quotation marks). To see who's currently online, use fbcmd fonline. You can show the last x amount of messages in your inbox by using fbcmd inbox X, of course replacing the X with a number. To check out your news feed, using fbcmd stream, and like a post using fbcmd like [post ID]. To upload a picture to Facebook, use fbcmd addpic [path of image] [optional album ID] [optional tag].

Conclusion

All in all, it's pretty cool to be able to do all this with Facebook directly from the command line. Of course, this method of accessing Facebook isn't for everyone, and is more for the big-time geeks or for showing off. So use this if you dare, but it's pretty cool once it's successful.

How cool is using Facebook over a command line to you? What would be your favorite way to access Facebook? Let us know in the comments!